Publications: ExchangeMonitor Morning Briefing

Exelon Corp. is considering selling its nuclear plants, Bloomberg reports.  The business wire reported Monday afternoon that sources close to the energy company say it’s considering selling some of its non-utility assets, but a final decision hasn’t been made. “As we most recently communicated on our second quarter earnings call, we regularly review our corporate […]

COVID-19 has made remote work much more common for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, and could alter work practices even after the pandemic recedes, the office’s top career official said Tuesday. Even with some people return to cleanup sites across the country, at EM headquarters in Washington, D.C., there is still only […]

The Department of Energy’s top brass joined the governor of Tennessee, congressmen and local dignitaries Tuesday at the Oak Ridge Site to celebrate taking down contaminated facilities at what was originally the K-25 uranium enrichment complex, now the East Tennessee Technology Park. “The work that this entailed is simply staggering,” Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s enterprise-wide procurement honcho predicted a competition to pick a new management contractor for the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex would conclude in time to replace the incumbent by Oct. 1, 2021, and without any protest. “We don’t get protested,” Bob Raines, the agency’s associate administrator for acquisition […]

The Donald Trump administration’s lead nuclear negotiator on Tuesday called on the arms control community to publicly back the White House’s drive to condition an indeterminate extension of the New START treaty with Russia on a verifiable freeze in deployment of all nuclear warheads, even those not covered by the bilateral agreement. “I think it’s […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a meeting Thursday addressing licensing issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Commissioners will discuss work hours, security inspection exemptions and other pandemic-related topics.  On March 30, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) made work-hour exceptions, allowing plant operators to work up to 86 hours in a work week, up from […]

Bill Moore, a geologist with more than 25 years of experience in the environmental cleanup business, is the new executive director for the Tennessee-based Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association. Bob Eby, the organization’s board president, announced Moore’s appointment Tuesday during the trade group’s first virtual 2020 Business Opportunities and Technical Conference. Moore has worked […]

The No. 2 manager at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office will keynote a Tennessee-based organization’s virtual Business Opportunities Conference this morning. Todd Shrader, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, addresses the Energy, Technology and Environmental Business Association’s gathering at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. Shrader is […]

A story in Monday’s Weapons Complex Morning Briefing (“Nun Who Breached Y-12 Perimeter Dies at 84”) should have said that SOC is the physical security provider under Consolidated Nuclear Security’s contract to manage the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex.

The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state can use education along with the specter of financial loss in pushing ethical standards for contractors, the site’s local fed said recently.  The DOE has mandated ethics programs for major contractors and this effort is “very similar to a safety program” in that it’s designed to […]

Kentucky-based Swift & Staley appears to be staying on another 22 months as the infrastructure support services contractor at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in Kentucky. The latest summary of major contracts from DOE, dated last Friday, shows Swift & Staley’s term as the services provider at the former gaseous diffusion plant site has […]

After weeks of reporting that Washington and Moscow might be close to a follow-on deal to or an extension of the landmark New START treaty, President Donald Trump’s lead arms-control negotiator is scheduled for a public talk today about China’s nuclear arsenal. Unless the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, agree to extend […]

Republican Illinois State Rep. Tom Demmer, determined to save Exelon’s Byron Generating Station from closure, launched a website last week to gin up support for state subsidies to stop the plant from closing next fall.  Exelon announced plans to close the Byron and Dresden Generating Stations in late August, calling them “uneconomic” and plagued by […]

The Sandia National Laboratories confirmed nine new cases of COVID-19 among its workforce last week, raising the lab network’s total since the start of the outbreak to 86 cases. As of Friday, Sandia Albuquerque had nine new cases while Sandia California, near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had two new cases, a Sandia spokesperson said. […]

The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico received six new positive COVID-19 tests for its workers between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7, bringing the site total to 45 so far in the pandemic. In addition, another worker at the DOE Hanford Site in Washington state has tested positive, bringing the total […]

Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization will begin preparing borehole sites this year at the South Bruce site in the province of Ontario with plans to begin drilling next spring, according to a recent update to the South Bruce Community Liaison Committee. South Bruce is one of two sites the organization is considering to build a […]

Comments are due Thursday on a request for information notice issued by the Department of Energy on plans to build the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative facility near the Savannah River National Laboratory site in South Carolina. The estimated $45-million facility will be built on about five acres within the campus of the University of South Carolina-Aiken […]

Sister Ardeth Platte, the nun who breached the perimeter of the Y-12 National Security Site in 2010 as part of an anti-nuclear protest, died in her sleep late last week in Washington at age 84, media reported. Platte, by the time of her death a well-known anti-nuclear-weapons protester, served time in jail for her trespassing […]

Personnel at the Pantex Plant will have their dosimetry badges analyzed at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee indefinitely after the Texas assembly facility’s decades-old dosimetry processing equipment finally broke down. Pantex shifted dosimetry processing to Y-12 on a permanent basis at the end of September, and “there are no current plans to restore […]

Joe Franco, the Department of Energy’s deputy manager at the Hanford Site’s Richland Operations Office in Washington state, is leaving the agency to take another job. Tuesday was the “farewell” day at Richland for Franco, Hanford Site Manager Brian Vance said during his update Wednesday to the Hanford Advisory Committee. Franco has been a DOE […]

As of this week there have been a total of 175 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, Hanford Site Manager Brian Vance said Wednesday during a webcast advisory board meeting. Vance, the Hanford site manager, provided the number in response to a question from a member of […]

A California activist group wants federal money to fund cancer research in communities living near power plants — an effort suggested by the National Academy of Sciences years ago but ultimately dropped by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission due to cost. The petition is organized by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation, a Del Mar, Calif., nonprofit that’s […]

Eletronuclear, Brazil’s state-run utility, gave Westinghouse Electric Company a contract to extend operations by 20 years at the country’s only functioning nuclear power plant. The duo will conduct engineering analyses to prolong the life of the Angra 1 plant to 2044 from 2024. The analyses will be facilitated to maintain the plant’s safety and longevity […]

Voters in Eastham, Massachusetts, the site of the decommissioned Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, voted overwhelmingly in favor of asking Gov. Charlie Baker to amp up security at the plant.  In a local election held Tuesday, over one-fifth of the less-than-5,000 person town agreed to “direct the local government to request that Governor Baker and the […]

The liquid waste contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina hired 151 new employees with an average age of 37 during fiscal 2020. As a result, the average age of the 2,600-person workforce at Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation (SRR) is 48-years old, Phil Breidenbach, president & project manager of the […]